2025: seven vital trends for corporate digital communicators

From geopolitical turmoil to generative AI, 2024 was a year of change, uncertainty and volatility.
This had a big impact on corporate digital communications teams.
Reputation-threatening crises flared, budgets tightened, and artificial intelligence continued to transform how people get information about your company – and everything else.
But what challenges and opportunities is 2025 likely to bring for people in charge of the corporate website and other digital channels?
Here are seven predictions:
1. Best practice digital communications will become compliance-vital
“When it comes to accessibility on our corporate website, what’s merely recommended today is about to become a regulatory requirement,” said the manager of a global bank’s corporate website on a call last week.
For many companies, the same is true for online sustainability reporting.
In Europe, all this is thanks to two new regulations:
- The European Accessibility Act, which will become law in all EU member states in June 2025. It’s designed to ensure equal access to digital goods and services throughout Europe. This includes websites.
- The European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. This came into force in January 2023, but starts affecting sustainability reports published from 2025. It’s designed to strengthen, widen and standardise the way that companies report on sustainability issues.
For anyone involved in managing the corporate website, all this means that striving for accessibility and sustainability reporting best practice is no longer just a corporate communications and reputation management imperative; it’s now also a vital part of your company’s licence to do business.
Bowen Craggs will be producing guidance on this – and equivalent regulations in the US and elsewhere – aimed specifically at corporate digital communicators in early 2025.
2. Corporate crises will become more likely – with digital channels the front line of defence
There are a lot of “unknowns” when it comes to the future impact of the new Trump presidency on the US, and global, corporate communications landscape. But judging by Trump’s own promises and past actions, and those of his senior appointees, it’s clear that an explicit strategy of unpredictability will be in play in the White House and the executive departments that surround it.
For companies, that means that domestic and foreign policies and proposals may change suddenly, dramatically – and acrimoniously.
An imminent proliferation of corporate communications crises is by no means certain – but it is more likely.
For corporate digital communicators, that means preparing the corporate website, and related online channels, for decisive messaging amid fast-changing events.
If your corporate website doesn’t yet lay out the company’s positions on potentially contentious issues, it’s now time to put that information in place – clearly and transparently. It’s far safer to do this now than waiting until a crisis hits.
3. Media relations activity must change dramatically
As we discuss in episode three of our podcast, the 2024 US presidential election campaign highlighted stark shifts in the media landscape. Traditional news outlets struggled to remain relevant as millions of people tuned into podcasts and swiped through TikTok to get information.
“You are the media now,” Elon Musk tweeted to his 200 million followers on the morning of November 6th.
Musk hyperbole aside, it’s certainly true that if your company wants to engage effectively in 2025, it needs to rethink what “media relations” actually means in the podcaster and online influencer age.
The “Media”, “Press” or “News” sections of most corporate websites do not yet reflect recent seismic shifts in the media industry. Changing this should be a priority in 2025.
4. AI search will evolve – and get even more important
This year saw generative AI reach the core of the way people find information: Google search.
Google’s “AI Overviews” are appearing at the top of more search results than ever – providing a single answer to the user’s question, above traditional organic result listings.
Each sentence in an AI Overview is explicitly linked to a specific source. The key question for corporate digital communicators: is Google using your company’s content to create its AI Overview, or material from third parties outside your control?
AI search will become ubiquitous in 2025 – which means that a rich, comprehensive, transparent corporate website, which tackles topics that external audiences want to know about, in language that they use rather than corporate jargon, will become more vital than ever.

Is Google using your company’s content to create its AI Overview, or material from third parties outside your control?
5. Your audiences’ thirst for authentic messaging will grow
Beyond the world of search, generative AI will also become more widely used in the content creation process, in companies, news outlets, and everywhere else. While this will bring plenty of opportunities for saving corporate communicators’ time, it also carries a risk: switching people off.
As the online world gets flooded with AI generated material, customers, jobseekers, employees and others will become increasingly thirsty for content that feels genuinely hand-crafted, and that comes from the heart, rather than from ChatGPT.
So investing in videos, articles, testimonials and other editorial material that genuinely feels real should be high on the list for corporate website and social media teams in the year ahead.
6. Social media: hedge your company’s bets
Social media channel Bluesky gained a million users a day during November.
TikTok looks like it might be banned in the US in early 2025.
X (formerly Twitter) has become highly politicised, and saw user numbers fall by a third in the UK and a fifth in the US during the year to September 2024, according to the Financial Times.
What does the fluid social media landscape mean for corporate digital communicators?
Moving into 2025, it’s important to avoid betting the farm on any social channel. Invest in your corporate website – which, unlike any social channel, is completely under your control – as the mothership of truth about every aspect of your business. This will give you the centre of gravity needed for coordinated social media communications, however that world evolves in the months ahead. Do have a listen to episode three of our podcast for more on this.
7. Your importance to your company will increase – but it’s vital to measure this
All these developments will make the corporate website and other digital channels, as well as the people who manage them, more strategically important than ever for any company that wants to cut through and protect its reputation in 2025.
Measuring the value your channels bring to the company is just as important. Bowen Craggs’ benchmarking and visitor research services are designed to help you do exactly this.
If you choose measures that your colleagues and bosses truly care about, you really can demonstrate just how powerful – and increasingly important – your work is.
As the head of digital communications at one of the world’s biggest companies said to me last month: “this really is our time.”